A few years ago, I was involved in removing a priceless treasure from the British Museum. Ian Jenkins, a senior curator in its Greek and Rome department, was my co-speaker at a Guardian event and he brought along a small bronze divinity, more valuable than any of the 2,000 or so pieces now missing from the museum’s vaults. This was something senior staff could do, he explained, so long as they returned the item before midnight. We shared a taxi afterwards, and I saw him go into the darkened museum with it.
In retrospect, this looks like part of a quaint, gentlemanly regime in which curators were permitted an easy, intimate relationship with objects in their care. That has gone wrong in a seismic way in the very department of which Jenkins was such a brilliant star, up to his death in 2020, with the chronic, cumulative loss of overlooked items from the stores, many from the renowned Townley Collection assembled in the 18th century.
